BIRDS OF THE AUSTRALASIAN SOUTH POLAR QUADRANT. 
Cape Horn. In November they are still dark; but when the nesting season 
is over and the summer sun has done its work, the richness goes entirely and 
a pale buff colour takes its place. Then comes the autumnal moult in 
January or February, and the birds take on a mottled plumage, as one by one 
the almost black-brown feathers make then' way out amongst the faded 
feathers of the head and back. 
We met the bird in November in 1901, when we first sighted ice, in 62° 
S. lat. and 140° E. long. Two or three followed us a long way to the north 
again, away from the ice, but left us five days before we sighted the 
Macquarie Islands. They were in full dark plumage. 
On our next journey southward a dozen or more met us as we again 
encountered ice in January. They had been roosting on a berg and were in 
full moult, with primaries missing in the wings and a mottled plumage of buff 
and black-brown feathers intermixed. Throughout the ice-pack we had 
them with us, and on the 10th of January we saw them flying in a flock in a 
south-easterly direction down the coast of South Victoria Land. All that 
night and the following day we had flocks of them around us, some flying at 
great heights, turning and wheeling together at a given signal in contrast 
to the independent and irregular flight of a flock of Snow Petrels. All were 
moulting, as one could see by the missing primaries of the wings. Several 
were caught on threads. They had been feeding on small fish and squids, 
the beaks of which formed part of the contents of their stomachs. On January 
12th we lost them for a while, and saw no more till we found them in excep¬ 
tionally large numbers at the extreme eastern edge of the Great Ice Barrier. 
Here in S. lat. 76° 50' and W. long. 158° we discovered King Edward VII.’s 
Land, and the unusual abundance of this bird may mean that they breed 
somewhere in the locality. There was no spot in sight, however, that could 
possibly have suited them; there were no rocky cliffs worth mentioning, 
and no land that was not buried in an undulating and almost unbroken 
sheet of snow and ice. Returning by this spot a few days later we were 
again surroimded by large numbers of the birds, but we lost them the next 
day entirely and as suddenly as we had before met with them on the same 
spot. They were not on passage, but were flying to and fro as though in 
the neighbourhood of their breeding place; more than this wo cannot say. 
From that time onward for two full years in McMurdo Sound we did not see 
the bird, save once, when a single straggler passed the ship. 
On our homeward journey, however, in 1904, we fell in with them on 
February 26th. We were in pack-ice, and on the 29th we saw large numbers 
and kept them with us as we passed between the Balleny Islands. They were 
not in flocks. Some were freslify moulted, but others had only just begun. 
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